


as i weep all the days and nights of my life

by procellous



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: (the other one is a pun. but a symbolic pun notice me victor hugo), (well technically only one highly symbolic bird), Angst, Canon Compliant, F/M, Gen, Ghost Sex, Ghosts, Grief/Mourning, Highly Symbolic Birds, Hurt No Comfort, Identity Issues, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Canon, Sansa Stark is the Queen in the North, Sansa-centric, absolutely one hundred percent not a fix it, short and sad just like me, technically all the starks show up but since they don't get speaking roles they don't get tags, these are a fun bunch of tags aren't they, …sort of it's complicated
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-23
Updated: 2019-06-23
Packaged: 2020-05-16 20:33:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19325581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/procellous/pseuds/procellous
Summary: The Queen in the North grieves for Sansa Stark. There is no one else left who remembers the girl.





	as i weep all the days and nights of my life

**Author's Note:**

> this was supposed to be fun vaguely-creepy very-sad ghostsex and it turned into this instead
> 
> i'm not sorry
> 
> title from andromache's lament for hektor

iii.  
The window blows open, bringing with it the wind and the faint snow. His feet make no sound on the stone. 

“Sansa,” Theon says, his voice a caress. All the warmth his body no longer has remains in his voice. 

The fire is ashes and the wind nips at her bare skin, but she does not tremble. The cold is nothing to her. 

“Theon,” she says, smiling. Her eyes are closed, but she knows where he is. He crosses the room, sits on her bed. The mattress does not dip. “I didn’t see you at the coronation.”

“I was there.” She can’t see his smile, but she can hear it in his voice. His hand brushes through her hair, a faint breeze stirring the strands. “Your people love you, my Queen.”

“And you?”

“If you’ll have me.” His voice is soft as sunshine, as sweet as honey-wine. 

“Always.” She reaches out, and can almost feel the curve of his cheek. “Always.”

His trembling, shaking sigh is a breath of winter wind against her skin. “You’ll have to guide my hands,” he says. 

He’s cold, of course, and his fingers stiff, but she folds them into her hands and runs them along her body, sliding the thin shift off her shoulder and baring her breast. Trails of gooseflesh follow the path of their hands, down her ribs and the flat plane of her stomach, her hips and thighs. 

“Sansa,” he breathes, a gasp, a prayer—

Snow drifts in through the open window.

i.  
Theon lingers. His body is ashes, now, half laid in the crypts and half scattered to the sea; still, she sees him—long and lean with a wicked smirk, young and laughing, out of the corner of her eye; a warrior in armor reflected in darkened windows and the pools of the godswood, his bow in his hand and a small, almost shy smile on his lips; a faint lingering scream, a cry of pain and of despair, pressed into the stones like ink on the pages of a book, dying and dyeing. 

(She has scrubbed every dark corner seven times over, and she can still smell the bloodstains on the stone.)

The men have ridden off to war once again, and left the real work to the rest: the women, the children, the elderly, the wounded. (They are all wounded.) There are not enough hands for the rebuilding; the strong have left, to death or the South. (The words might be the same thing, for nothing good comes when wolves go south.) There are homes to rebuild and rubble to clear, rusted arguments and swords to take to the scrap-pile, survivors to heal. Even after the battle is over and won, people still die of it—their wounds and their sickness, their grief and their hunger. 

He becomes a comfort to her. (Not the screams, never the screams, but—the rest.) She closes her eyes sometimes, when she should be tallying sums, and she can hear him. 

_My lady. Sansa._

“Theon,” she whispers into the silence, into the darkness. 

Bran is present more often than not, since the Night King fell. Sometimes she almost sees her little brother in him. He smiles, and she can imagine, for a moment—only ever a moment—that they all lived. That around the corner she’ll find Robb and Theon and Jon, teasing and taunting each other; that Arya is in the training ground with Rickon, teaching him to sword fight, with Mother and Father standing on a platform and watching; Father calls out encouragement while Mother shakes her head fondly at Arya’s antics. 

The moment passes, the dream fades, and the world is hard and cold again. (She is alone again.) It hurts all the more afterwards, but she can’t stop herself pressing on the bruises, picking at the scabs. Once these halls sang with laughter, and the pain is the proof that there was once life here. 

Robb throws a shadowy arm around Theon’s shoulders, their silent words echoing off the stone; Father’s hand rests on her shoulder when she watches her people at work; Mother combs out her hair as she reads through reports; Rickon laughs, wild and free, as he runs through the woods with Shaggydog at his side.  
The Long Night has ended, and day has come again: but the dead still walk in Winterfell, and neither dragonglass nor Valyrian steel nor fire will stop them. 

vii.  
Her hand traces along her breast, the swell of her stomach, the mound between her legs. Her fingers slip between the red curls to brush the soft lips, to dip inside with gentle motions. 

She closes her eyes, and lets herself feel a kiss, soft and sweet, of course he would be; he knows how she’s been hurt, and he would never want to cause her pain. He would kiss her there, again and again, until she wept with pleasure, and then he would lift his head and grin at her, that cocky smirk she knew so well, and there would be nothing left but to kiss him, then, her lips on his, and it would not matter that they were neither of them whole; they could be only Sansa and only Theon, with no titles or history, no other names than those. 

But it is a dream, and phantoms fade when confronted with the light. It is a dream, and her dreams have been crushed, one by one. It is a dream, and only a bitter comfort.  
  
vi.  
She kneels in the godswood. The red leaves of the weirwood tree rustle in a cold wind above her as she prays for a miracle. 

“A child,” she prays, her lips making no sound. “A child to bear the name of Stark. Give me a child.”

She rises again, her head held high, and if the old gods have an answer for her they do not speak of it.  
  
iv.  
He cannot kiss her, and she cannot kiss him; she closes her eyes and feels the icy brush of the wind, and it is never enough. 

She opens the window, and holds out her arms. He is there, with the wind and the cold; when she closes her eyes she takes his hand in her. She can almost feel his hand on her waist as he spins her around. They have no music but the wind that makes the trees moan and sing a song too deep and high for words. They speak no words to each other; they have never needed words between them. 

Her tears freeze into ice on her cheeks, and it is almost a kiss.  
  
viii.  
The Queen does not have husbands or lovers; the Queen suffers no hands to touch her. She is their Lady of Snows, as pure as the fresh fall. Yet her belly rounds beneath her dark gowns and the whispers begin, asking only one question: Who did the Queen take to bed?

Many men claim that they fathered her child, but many men lie. (The dead do not, cannot, lie; there is nothing left of them but the truth and the pain.) 

Her labor is long and hard as winter, the sheets stained red. She closes her eyes, slumps in exhaustion. (The midwives do not put voice to their fear, lest it come to pass.)

The babe comes, cold as clay and silent as stone. The cord is tight against the neck. The Queen’s breathing is shallow. 

Two birds perch on the window-sill: a robin red-breast and a storm petrel. (It is strange to see a sea-bird in Winterfell, as strange as seeing a shark on a mountain-side.) They cry, and—

The cord loosens. The babe cries. The Queen’s eyes open. 

It is an omen, though few are sure of what. 

Those who knew Theon Greyjoy might say that the babe looks like him, save for the dark red curls; but those who knew Theon Greyjoy know that he could not father children, and died a full year before the babe was born besides, and so they say nothing. 

The whispers say that the Queen laid with a weirwood tree, and the child is from the old gods. The whispers say that the babe was fathered by a winter storm. The whispers say that no living man can touch her, their ice-cold best-beloved Queen—and so the babe was fathered by a dead man. 

The Queen smiles to hear the whispers, her babe at her breast, and denies none of them.  
  
v.  
His fingers stroke between her thighs, gentle and sure under her guiding hands. She moans at the touch, the icy air against her warmth. 

He is her husband, though they had no wedding-day; he is her husband, though they never spoke vows; he is her husband, though they wore no cloaks. (He is her husband, though he is dead.) It is only right that she should love her husband, should take him to bed. 

“Theon,” she gasps as their fingers brush inside her. 

When she wakes, she is alone in her bed. The window is closed, but there is still a chill in the air, a rime along the window-sill, a faint smell of salt. 

When she looks at the glass, her love’s face is beside hers. He smiles, a faint flickering thing, and is gone when she turns.  
  
ix.  
Ghosts walk walk in the ancient halls of Winterfell. Winter winds take wolf-shape, laying at the foot of the throne. The shadows have eyes, and the stones scream the echoes of pain. The grief endures, and demands the world reshaped around it. 

Songs are sung of the wolf-queen, the winter-queen, who led their armies against men living and dead, who bore them to victory and to spring. Her people love her, and she loves them. The songs sung in daylight and taught to summer breezes name her both beautiful and wise. 

(But there are other songs, songs sung in the dark of night when the chill winds blow and the howl of distant moons warns the moon to hide. They are songs sung to small children who shiver in their blankets and jump at shadows, songs sung around campfires when the night is black and heavy as a shroud and the stars are sparks from the cracking wood—for they are songs that speak of the dead who cannot rest, songs that speak of the blood on the stone that cries out for an answer. They are not songs of the Queen in the North, not truly.)  
  
ii.  
The raven comes from King’s Landing. The Targaryen Queen is dead at Jon’s hands, and her followers intend to take his head for it. 

Sansa will not lose another brother to the South, but when she leaves she has lost one anyway. (When she returns to Winterfell she is alone.)

Her ghosts linger in the stones of her home. _Father and Mother. Robb and Theon and Jon. Arya and Bran and Rickon. Grey Wind. Lady. Nymeria. Summer. Shaggydog. Ghost._

She is the Queen in the North, and she is alone. (The lone wolf—)  
  
x.  
The Queen in the North grieves for Sansa Stark. There is no one else left who remembers the girl.

**Author's Note:**

> if you need a palate cleanser i did write a theonsa fix-it it's [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19099381)
> 
> or you can yell at me on [tumblr](https://vanjalism.tumblr.com)


End file.
